Pants!

The word 'pants', as any fule kno, is one of the many examples of the UK and the US being divided by their common language. In America the word signifies 'trousers'; in England what we wear underneath them. I used to be puzzled by the fact that in American English the word can also be used as a pejorative term e.g. 'your phone is pants'. I no longer am.
   A couple of years ago my elder daughter bought me some Pierre Cardin underpants for Christmas. They were admirable garments in almost every respect: boxers with lycra, my preferred style of underwear. Unfortunately they had a fatal flaw: no flies. One of the many advantages of being male is not having to get undressed every time you want a pee. No long queues in public lavatories for us chaps; no problem either when you're caught short on a country walk. And now, I raged, before throwing them into a drawer for redundant clothes, some buffoon has decided to discard centuries of collective wisdom in order to make a fashion statement. Alas, two years on I have discovered the problem is much greater than even my worst nightmares would have led me to believe. To explain.
   A couple of weeks ago, returning from the UK to Italy I managed to leave a suitcase containing, amongst other things, a week's supply of underwear on a train. This meant I had to fish out the Pierre Cardin pants from the reject drawer. It also meant I had to buy more underwear. And this is when I made my terrible discovery: in the whole of our local shopping centre not a single outlet sold cotton and lycra boxers with flies. The cheap unknown labels had joined their upmarket cousins in this sartorial lunacy. And at last I appreciated our transatlantic cousins' linguistic wisdom - for nowadays

                                                    Pants ARE pants!

Butterflies, Language and Crime.

Last week I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and ended up feeling like Ray Bradbury's Eckels, just back from his holiday, staring at the sign in Time Safari's office.
  Previously I'd been reading nothing but crime fiction. A friend had  introduced me to Jo Nesbo and Fred Vargas and I thoroughly enjoyed both of the books he lent me: Nesbo's The Redbreast and Vargas's Have Mercy on Us All. He told me that like Camelleri's Montalbano novels Vargas's should ideally be read in sequence as there is a developing thread connecting them - in the case of Commissaire Adamsberg his relationship with his occasional lover Camille. So I began with The Chalk Circle Man. which I found entertaining but far less interesting than Have Mercy on Us All.  I read the next book in the sequence - Seeking Whom He May Devour - hoping to confirm the obvious explanation that Vargas's skills improved with time. At first, to my consternation, I found this book rather tedious, possibly because Adamsberg hardly features in it until half way through. I also had problems with the translator, David Bellos, choosing to give the book a new title rather than simply translating its original: L'Homme à l'envers. The book centres on a homicidal wolf, and in the AV's translation of Peter's first epistle 'seeking whom he may devour' refers to a lion not a wolf. Although Bellos puts the phrase into the mouths of characters in the novel I doubt that the French original used an instantly recognisable allusion to the Petrine epistle. The original title, on the other hand, neatly encapsulates both the novel's central motif, lycanthropia, and the dual nature of the murderer. That aside, once Adamsberg took centre-stage things improved enormously so I'll probably buy the next in the series: Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand.
   This year's offering by Camilleri, Una lama di luce, was a distinct improvement on the last few books. Once again Montalbano was playing Mike Tucker to an intelligent version of Vicky but this time he ended the relationship because he'd come to terms with the reality of his life:

E ora sapiva finalmenti quello che doviva fari. Con la sò morti, François ligava lui a Livia e Livia a lui chiossà d'essere maritati.
…Quella stissa sira, alle novi, Marian tuppiò a longo a 'na porta che non sapiva che non le sarebbi stata mai cchiù aperta.
And now he finally knew what he had to do. François [a boy he'd once been going to adopt] had bound him to Livia [his long term partner] with his death more than if they were married.
… At nine the same evening Marian [the younger woman] knocked at the door for a long time, unaware that it would never again be opened.

   Having overdosed on gialli, I thought that it was time to take a break from crime fiction and read a 'proper' novel again. Bel Canto was one of the books we'd inherited from an American friend when she sold her house in Italy, and I was encouraged to read it by an article in the Corriere which, starting from the absurd premise that women are incapable of writing great fiction, listed Ann Patchett as a case in point. Alas the novel didn't reveal her to be another Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood, let alone an Emily Brontë. Nor had I escaped the world of crime.
   The action of the novel takes place in the official residence of the Vice-President of an unidentified South American country where a birthday party for a Japanese industrialist is being hosted. A passionate opera-lover, he has been persuaded to come to South America because the world's leading soprano has been engaged to sing at the party. The party is interrupted by the violent incursion of a band of rather inept terrorists who hold the guests hostage for several months. Gradually the individual personalities of the guests and terrorists emerge and a variety of relationships develop between them. Most importantly, the Japanese businessman, Mr Hosokawa - we never learn his first name - and the American diva, Roxanne Coss, fall in love; as do his interpreter Gen Watanabe and a female terrorist, Carmen. The setting and the characterisation are handled well, but the ending is lame. Although one could justify it structurally the author fails to make it feel authentic and a great writer must do both. I'd had problems with the novel's authenticity earlier. The guests and terrorists come from a variety of linguistic communities and are consequently heavily dependent on Gen's services. The narrator comments that some have a smattering of languages other than their own and offers the Italians' knowledge of schoolboy French as an example. The problem is that whilst it is true that Italians learn French at school, anyone who has lived in Italy will know that most Italians have little difficulty in understanding Spanish - the language of the terrorists. A fact which completely escapes Ann Patchett, and a major blunder for a novel which is centred on exploring the relationship between language and life. I thought that I'd detected another problem in the novel's understanding of language. A priest is described as 'performing' sacraments rather than celebrating them, and giving a dying man 'viaticum' rather than the viaticum. I assumed that this would be due to the author being protestant and consequently being as unfamiliar with catholic terminology as she was with Italian culture. Wrong: she had a catholic education. I then assumed that this was an American usage cognate with their calling maths 'math' and sport 'sports'. Wrong again. Consulting the current catholic catechism revealed that the viaticum has dropped the definite article throughout the English-speaking world. The reason for my confusion was that I'd stopped practising my religion in England since the early seventies, only returning to it when we moved to Italy. Although, like every language, English is in a constant state of flux, when you live in the middle of the river you're caught up by its movement and are carried along by it. 'Train station' replacing railway station and 'bored of' supplanting bored by are both deplored by us elderly pedants, but they no longer strike us as odd, only regrettable. However, by losing contact with the language of English catholicism for forty years the changes struck me forcefully. By abandoning catholicism, like Eckles I had stepped on a butterfly.
   This Wednesday my wife and I went with two friends to a concert at Villa Vinci: '"Primadonna" La tradizione del Belcanto'. In Ann Patchett's novel the soprano was a white American and her accompanist Japanese. Villa Vinci is even more sumptuous than the her fictional Vice-President's residence. In a mirror image of the novel, the soprano - Hiroko Morita - was Japanese and her accompanist, Roberto Galletto, white. Fortunately no terrorists emerged from the central heating ducts. But the butterfly put in an appearance: Miss Morita's final aria was Un bel di vedremmo!

Paranoia rules

 

 
 
In 2010, when a snowbound passenger was prosecuted for tweeting that he'd like to blow up the airport in which he was stranded, I thought that John Bull's island had plumbed the depths of stupidity.
Yesterday I was proved wrong. Some dipstick got the driver of the coach he was travelling on to summon assistance because a man of 'asian appearance' was pouring liquid into what turned out to be an electronic cigarette. As a consequence a motorway was closed for seven hours as 'a full multi-agency response was put into motion, with an army bomb disposal team, a chemical and biological weapons team, armed police, counter-terrorism officers, ambulance and fire crews'.
I know it's not a crime to be stupid, otherwise the gaols would be full to overflowing with Daily Mail readers and every non-billionaire who's ever voted Tory. But in this case I think an exception should be made for the dipstick, the coach-driver and whoever failed to check the facts before launching the 'multi-agency response' and making hundreds of people's lives a misery.

Posted with Blogsy

Housewives no longer desperate

 

My wife and I watched the final two episodes of Desperate Housewives on Wednesday, a show which has been part of our mental hinterland since 2005. Like most long-running series it had gradually run out of steam, shedding viewers on the way. On a superficial level the ending was ludicrous: I know little about the American legal system but find it hard to believe that any system would have credited Mrs McCluskey's confession or ignored the mass of evidence of Bree's involvement.
However, like the equally improbable myths of the world's great religions, the ending did contain two profound truths: the redemptive power of love and the fact that, as Christ put it, 'Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it'. Mrs McCluskey's redemptive gesture was a direct result of the housewives offering her terminal nursing care - not that it was much in evidence! Their act of love brought them salvation. And it was only when the housewives leave the comfort zone of their life in Wisteria Lane that they are able to achieve their full potential: Lynette as CEO of the American branch of a multinational company, Gabrielle with her own company and television show. In a nicely judged satirical touch, the alcoholic and promiscuous Bree - who against all the evidence believes herself to be the embodiment of traditional American values - is elected to the Kentucky State Legislature as a conservative Republican Representative.
As no one reads this blog, there is no danger of my appearing in Private Eye's 'Pseuds' Corner' leaving me free to share this final flight of fancy:
Just as Christ had his Last Supper with his disciples the day before he left this earthly life so the housewives met for a final game of poker. Re-enacted as the Mass, the Last Supper symbolises the bond between christians; similarly, their card game had a quasi-sacramental role for the housewives.
As with Lost, the programme's producer gave it a closure which, whilst not entirely convincing or stemming naturally from the hodgepodge of material which had proceeded it, did articulate:

'Our almost instinct almost true
What will survive of us is love.'

Philip Larkin and the translators of the Authorised Version may have put the idea more elegantly but, to adapt the Heineken beer slogan, I guess Desperate Housewives refreshes the hearts the others cannot reach.

 

Earthquake in the north.

April's revelation of the corruption at the heart of the holier-than-thou Northern League was followed by the collapse of its vote in last month's local elections. Tragically the benign psephological earthquake which had metaphorically struck 'Padania' was followed this month by its literal cousin.
   The picture below graphically reveals that northern Italy's problems don't stem from an influx of African immigrants, as the xenophobic and racist Northern League would have its deluded followers believe. The real danger comes from the African continent itself pushing further into Europe as the Apennine phallus attempts to penetrate  the mons veneris of the Alps. Geologically speaking, Italy is part of Africa not Europe; the real immigrants are the Bossi clan not the poor souls fleeing across the mediterranean to escape war and famine.

To hell in a handcart.

Three interesting articles in yesterday's papers throw light on the current economic crisis. The article by Antonio Puri Purini in the Corriere della Sera, Dalla Finanza all' Antipolitica i Nemici della Moneta unica, identifies the two enemies of the single currency: international finance and the far right. The former object to the EU 'perché unica a mantenere un sistema non interamente dominato, grazie all’ economia sociale di mercato, dalla logica del profitto' [because it is the only one to maintain a system not entirely dominated by the logic of profit, thanks to its social market economy]. The leaders of the latter are the agents of international finance and their followers its dupes, driven by ignorance and fear.

An article by Philip Inman in the Guardian dissects the failures of Monetarism. Although its proponents' recipe for growth is cutting workers' terms and conditions it 'is alarming how easily monetarist ideas have prevailed …monetarists have convinced working people they are the reformers and that social democrat parties are a conservative barrier to recovery. Social democrats only seek to preserve the privileges and outmoded practices that got us into trouble, they argue.' And so the turkeys vote for Christmas, repeating Cameron's cry that it woz Gordon Brown wot got us in this mess, when in reality his mistake like that of 'Hank Paulson in the US and finance ministers across Europe of all political colours was to believe in the low regulation story and watch, with regulators at their side, as banks went on a lending spree.'

The third article, by Dominic Rushe JP Morgan investment boss Ina Drew quits over bank's $2bn losses, reminds us that the spree isn't over. The only block would be strong EU institutions opposed to 'una parte della finanza internazionale dominata da hedge funds aggressivi e insofferenti verso regole e freni, è inesorabilmente attratta verso la prospettiva del guadagno immediate' [the section of international finance dominated by aggressive hedge funds, intolerant of rules and restraints and inexorably attracted by the prospect of short-term gains]. No wonder they want to destroy first the single currency and the EU itself and reduce its workers to the miserable condition of Chinese coolies or Indian untouchables.

No country for old men.

Yeats may have been right in thinking that Byzantium, or the New Rome, was no country for old men, but the same does not apply to what was once the heartland of the Western Empire. Italy's former priapic premier is far from being the country's only elderly politician.   

   Today's Corriere carried a news-item  about the 95 year old retired doctor, Mario Spallone, currently standing for election as mayor of Avezzano in the Province of L'Acquila. Although he was the late leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti's, personal physician he is not, as one might have expected, standing as a candidate of the left. "Io sono communista … Io non ho niente a che fare con quella robaccia del PD!" [I'm a communist … I've nothing in common with that rubbish in the Democratic Party]. I guess he feels the same way about the PD as I do about New Labour. 

   His interviewer expressed astonishment at the unrepentant Stalinist's claim that he would be helped in his electoral campaign by the late Padre Pio. "E certo! Padre Pio morì tra le mia braccia, e io sono suo figlio spirituale. E lui mi aiuterà a vincere queste elezioni. Lui può …" [It's a sure thing! Padre Pio died in my arms and I'm his spiritual son. And he'll help me to win these elections. He really can …]

    And so, dear reader, you can see why I like living in Italy so much: it's full of crazy old men just like me.

Surprised by the media.

This month's Diabolik had two surprises in store, undermining two long held preconceptions. The first concerned the comic's language. Once I'd gained a basic grounding in Italian, I didn't expect to be lexically challenged by Diabolik, and until this month I wasn't. Then on page nine I had a repetition of the Corriere experience: words whose English translation was as foreign to me as their Italian originals. Diabolik comes across a safe 'di ultimissimo modello, in vanadio molibdeno'. I looked up the last two words and found their English equivalents were 'vanadium' and 'molybdenum', words which were utterly meaningless until I had read their definition in the Shorter Oxford. Now I suspect that my ignorance of the meaning of 'vanadium' may be peculiar to myself - as I was typing this post the browser's built-in spell checker tried to change 'vanadio' to 'vanadium'. But 'molybdenum', for God's sake!
   At school, comics went under the generic name of 'trash'. We were allowed half an hour before lights-out to 'swop trash', which we stored under our pillows. After that, to be out of bed was a beating offence. Although in my school's slang the term 'trash' was purely denotive, carrying no evaluative connotations, the fact remains that one doesn't read comics for their literary quality. Or so I thought.
   The plot in April's issue of Diabolik revolves around the collaboration of 'Il Re del Terrore' and his beautiful companion, Eva Kant, with an elderly Art Historian. They are attempting to unmask a criminal who is vandalising stolen works of art by stripping them of their jewels and substituting fake stones before selling them on. The elderly professor is a cultivated and decent man who is rather taken by Eva. Having decided on their plan to ensnare the art thief, Professor Ubold hands Eva a rose saying, 'Lady Kant, vi assicuro che se voi aveste anche solo una trentina d'anni in più, vi farei una corta spietata' [Lady Kant, let me assure you that if you were just thirty years older, I would court you remorselessly]. I was brought up short. One would have expected him to say, 'If I were thirty years younger' - it's certainly what I would have said under similar circumstances. Instead, the anonymous writer has not merely avoided cliché but has succinctly revealed Ubold's character. He appreciates Eva not simply for her outward beauty, but for her intrinsic qualities - qualities which will still be there in thirty year's time. This melds beautifully with the Professor's passion for art: he values things for what they are rather than for their superficial appearance, their cultural significance or their monetary value. The story ends with Eva sending the Professor a gift and his murmuring 'se solo fosse un po' più vecchia' [if only you were a little bit older] so demonstrating that his earlier words weren't simply for show. And so we have a story about Fine Art written with a touch of the literary art one expects in a great novel but which takes one aback when it appears in 'trash'.
   My wife didn't share my other surprise this month: the identity of the dead flatmate in White Heat which was only revealed in the final episode; she'd guessed it early on. Not that this mattered - unlike our normal TV fare White Heat wasn't a thriller or a detective drama. The series had a lukewarm reception from the critics writing in the broadsheets and, as one might expect, was universally panned by the intellectually challenged folk who contribute on-line vitriol to those newspapers' comments section. The programme was frequently compared unfavourably with Our Friends from the North. Having never watched the latter I have no opinion on its merits. As a West Countryman brought up to believe that the wogs begin at Gloucester, I was put off by its oxymoronic title. We know that north of Gloucester the country is infested by barbarians whom four hundred years of Roman rule failed to civilise. People who hideously disfigure the English language by swallowing their 'r's; untermenschen who wouldn't know what a dap was if one hit them on the head. On the other hand, we thoroughly enjoyed White Heat, so much so that angered by the sole review on IMDB I broke the habit of a lifetime and contributed an on-line comment of my own. Reviews written for IMDB have a longer shelf-life than on-line comments to newspapers and I thought it important that people shouldn't be put off viewing the series if it's repeated. I didn't attempt to counter the arguments offered by the original commentator: his limited understanding of dramatic structure and misuse of terms such as cliché suggested it would have been a waste of time. And in the end, unlike science, all opinions about literature are subjective. The only objective thing one can say of a novel, a poem, a play or a TV drama is 'I liked it' or 'I didn't'. I liked White Heat and I hope you might too.

Famiglia ladrona.

For the last three days the Northern League has been the lead story in the Italian media. It began with the news that the party's treasurer, Francesco Belsito, was being investigated for corruption, then it emerged that public money had been diverted from the League to pay the expenses of various members of the family of its leader, Umberto Bossi. Today the Corriere della Sera carried the news that Bossi had resigned yesterday at 4.30.
The ghastly Northern League is a xenophobic and racist organisation which prides itself on the north's self-proclaimed superiority to the feckless southern Italians running the country from Roma Ladrona (thieving Rome). I found it extremely gratifying, if unsurprising, that their claim to moral superiority has been so spectacularly and comprehensively exploded. Far-right parties attract people who - dimly aware of their own brutish appearance and limited intelligence - seek to comfort themselves with the belief that whole sections of the human race are even stupider and more repellent than themselves. As Fielding pointed out in his preface to Joseph Andrewes, this affectation makes these unfortunate beings an object of ridicule:
" Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves ... but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth."
Far-right parties draw support from those with a desperate need to believe that whatever their own personal inadequacies, collectively they belong to a superior group, identifiable by the colour of its skin or geographical location. The mainstream right, however, attracts those who, in defiance of elementary logic, identify themselves with their economic betters. They are happy for the Posh-Boys to cut the top rate of tax for the very wealthy whilst withdrawing benefits from ordinary working people, because they identify themselves with the first group though in reality they belong to the second. When Brenda Last, in A Handful of Dust, is worried that her husband's poor relations may think she's patronising them, Aunt Frances tells her: "Dear child, all these feelings of delicacy are valueless; only the rich realise the gulf that separates them from the poor."

Flying grannies.

Although there are times when we need to feel that other people share our ideas and beliefs we still have a sneaking feeling that we're unique. And we are, but not in as many ways as we like to think. We chose our children's names carefully, each one having a purely personal significance - only to discover they're in the current top ten. My startlingly original insights are instantly recognised as tedious commonplaces by the unfortunates on whom they are inflicted. Which brings us to child care.
   For the past few years My wife has travelled to the UK to look after our grandson when our younger daughter has to go away on business. We're well aware that many grandparents help look after their grandchildren on a daily basis. Although we feel guilty that we don't do more, living in a different country makes things difficult, and we rather fancied that my wife was pretty unique in flying in to babysit our grandson as often as she does. Wrong. An article in today's Observer 'based on a survey of 1,413 parents across Britain ... found that in a typical week 7% used relatives who normally live outside the UK to provide childcare, and 5% used it as their main form of childcare'.
   So, once again, we find that rather than being interestingly different we're boringly normal.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.

Southern Europeans are kind to children and cruel to animals; the reverse is true of their cousins stuck across the Channel - or so the old adage would have us believe. I think there are differences between the way the Italians and the British relate to dogs, but they're rather more complex than folk wisdom would suggest. And this is illustrated by two horrific cases which hit the Italian press this week
   On Wednesday the Corriere carried a report of a lorry driver being ripped to pieces by a pack of stray dogs in a layby near Leghorn. From today's paper I learned the same fate had befallen a pensioner on the outskirts of Milan. I cannot recall having ever read of a similar event in the UK. In England the victims are nearly always small children attacked by a single dog. The Pit-bull or Rottweiler usually belongs to a young man attempting to compensate for the diminutive size of his brain and penis by parading the streets with an animal almost as repellent as himself.
    For the Englishman's dog is an integral part of his self-image. The middle-classes favour Labradors, their origins as gun-dogs complementing the Range-Rover parked outside on the Chelsea street. I've had Border Collies since I was fifteen: no doubt I subconsciously hope that the breed's intelligence and good looks will have a halo effect. In Britain dogs live as part of the family, receiving titbits from the table and purloining the most comfortable armchair. All of which is incomprehensible to Italians: they like a clean home and allowing a dog inside would fill it with hair and muddy paw-prints. It's an animal, not a linguistically-challenged four-legged person and its proper place is in the yard on the end of a chain.
    But this doesn't mean that Italians don't like dogs. Luisa still weeps when she talks about her dog who died several decades ago. Our neighbours opposite encourage Meg to jump up and lick them. The husband, Mimi, is clearly fond of his own dog, but when it misbehaves he'll beat it so savagely that he'd be reported to the RSPCA by indignant neighbours if he lived in England. A corollary of the Italians viewing dogs as animals rather than surrogate children is their readiness to abandon them if they prove inconvenient. We frequently see stray dogs. Some look terrified and half-starved, running recklessly across the road; I guess they don't survive long. Most, though, look happy enough even when they're limping, presumably from being grazed by a car. I imagine they know a number of people who feed them. One of them, who'd been wandering around the countryside for several years was eventually taken in by Valentino and Cecilia who've named him Libero to reflect his being a free spirit. Lupo and his new girlfriend have recently adopted a rather unpleasant corgi who appeared in the village a few months ago, and a fellow boarder, Gordon, has taken pity on a dog who was thrown out of a car just outside his house.
    Whilst dogs are abandoned in England it's in far fewer numbers and the authorities quickly round them up. On the whole I like Italy's relaxed take on life, but in relation to stray dogs it can be fatal. As the Corriere put it last Wednesday: 'Il branco. Che trasforma cani abbandonati in predatori' [The pack. The instrument which turns abandoned dogs into predators]. If abandoned dogs meet others in the same situation they change from being harmless objects of compassion into potential killers.
   So in Italy dogs kill people because Italians don't think through the potential consequences of their actions when they abandon their animal. In England - in many cases - they kill people because their owner has trained them to be violent. All the deaths are tragic, but at least in Italy they're the result of human fecklessness rather than human wickedness.

Down the tubes.

Yesterday I was brought up short whilst reading a review of a book about Prato, a city near Florence which we'd stayed in three years ago. Once again I was reading something which seemed to make no sense:

Dei Professori Nesi scrive che «usano il telescopio e non il cannocchiale e così non vedono le persone» [Nesi writes that because academics use a telescope rather than a telescope they don't see individuals.]

I was familiar with the word 'cannocchiale', meaning 'telescope', and its similarity to the English word seemed to suggest that 'telescopio' was a synonym. But then the sentence would be meaningless. Perhaps 'telescopio' was a false friend, analogous to 'libreria' which - contrary to one's natural assumptions - means 'bookshop' not 'library'? So I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary and found that although the word did indeed mean telescope its use was limited to the type used by astronomers rather than the sort Long John Silver carried in his pocket. That was a cannocchiale! So, as in the case of straps, where English makes do with one word, Italian has several.

Then I recalled the archaic word 'spyglass' used to denote the seafarer's instrument. Perhaps we, too, once had words to discriminate between an optic looking at the stars and one helping you to spot whether the ship bearing down on you was flying the Jolly Roger? Only up to a point. To my surprise, the OED revealed that 'spyglass' didn't enter the language until 1705 and dropped out after 1875. 'Telescope' which I'd assumed to be the more modern coinage entered the language in the early 17th century - in the Italian or the Latin form - and denoted the astronomer's instrument. The Italians on the other hand - according to the Devoto-Oli dictionary - have been using both 'cannocchiale' and 'telescopio' since the 17th century: Lo Zingarelli says the former entered the language in 1608 and the latter in 1611.

So in the end I'm none the wiser as to why the Italians have different labels for the two types of telescope while we rely on context to distinguish them. Maybe there's some profound psychological reason, but I'm buggered if I know what it is.

 

 

 

Hop off, Johnny Foreigner.

 

A couple of days ago The Daily Mash pointed out another threat to our British way of life: this time to the way we insult someone with our fingers. Once again our national individuality is being eroded not by the cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel but by Uncle Sam.

 

Not that the continentals are entirely free from blame when it comes to transforming our culture for the worse. In the Fifties when I accompanied my grandfather, and around 30,000 other folk, to watch Bristol City get regularly thrashed at Ashton Gate, footballers' wages were capped at £10 a week. They were all local lads, many of whom played cricket for Gloucestershire during football's close season. And on the rare occasion when one of them scored a goal his team mates congratulated him with a manly handshake rather than the whole team leaping on each other's back in a gay bacchanalia ripped from the pages of Petronius. Such effete behaviour, characteristic of the continental teams we occasionally saw on Pathé Pictorial, would have been viewed with contempt by the British.

 

A lost world. It's no longer axiomatic that you support your local team; as the old chestnut has it: 'How do you confuse a Man United fan? Show him a map of Manchester'. In any case the players are no longer local, in the wealthier teams few are even British. Unless your club is financed by a multi-billionaire - again they are usually foreign - your chances of being promoted to the 'Premiership' are slight, and remaining there permanently zero. The FA Cup, far from being the highlight of the footballing year, holds as much interest for a big four manager as the next-door-neighbour's holiday snaps.

 

Ludicrous displays of 'spontaneous' euphoria when a team mate hits the back of the net arrived here decades ago, eventually spreading to cricket and rugby. The former has tried to make itself interesting by dressing its players in garish baby-grows plastered with advertisements and introducing one day games for the benefit of those with a chronic attention-span deficit. Although cricket could never be interesting, its white-robed officiants enacting their archaic ritual once had a certain æsthetic appeal akin to the now-defunct Latin mass. Somehow I don't think sledging, spot-fixing and clothes even the late Jimmy Saville would have found a trifle vulgar have the same cachet. Rugby Union, is no longer the amateur game for oafs played by gentlemen, rather a game for oafs played by cads. As with cricket it desperately matters 'whether you win or lose' for, like Wimbledon, it's become part of a culture which seeks to monetise every human activity.

 

I'm not writing with any particular sense of nostalgia, other than that of the elderly for a time when they were young. I'm not particularly interested in sport, and even if I were, I would no longer wish to stand shivering in Ashton Gate's Uncovered End, long since replaced by the Atyeo Stand. Rather, I'm reflecting on the way in which globalised capitalism has fundamentally altered British culture. Most football fans no longer trudge to the nearest stadium to support their local team, whose retired players were often the landlord of the pub you drank in or ran the nearby bike shop. Rather they slump on the sofa and gawp at the eleven multi-millionaire mercenaries employed by whichever team at the top of the Premiership they've decided to support. The disappearance of the wage-cap decades ago removed any chance of their local team ever joining that elite group.

 

Sport is merely one symptom of the all-pervasive influence of globalisation. The 'independent' Britain able to shape its own destiny is a myth. And the sooner the EDL, the BNP, and their more sophisticated fellow travellers in the Tory party wake up to the fact the better.

 



 



 



 

Straw Dog froths again.

In an article in today's Guardian Jack Straw reveals his latest contribution to making the world safe for democracy: abolishing the European Parliament. You may recall the great man's earlier strenuum pro virili vindicatorem when serving in the Blair junta: proposing restricting the right to jury trials; allowing Pinochet to return to Chile; turning down a request for asylum from a man fleeing Sadam Hussein's Iraq on the grounds that "we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven’t done anything wrong"; negotiating a treaty which allows the US to extradite British citizens for offences committed in Britain against US law without the UK having any reciprocal rights. No wonder he earned Thatcher's approval: "I would trust Jack Straw's judgement. He is a very fair man". The logical absurdity underlying his latest proposal - let's strike a blow at 'rule by unelected Brussels bureaucrats' by abolishing the one institution which gives the EU's citizens a voice - shouldn't surprise us. To the eurosceptic the word 'European' is, in itself, sufficient to bring on apoplexy.
The Guardian's article also reveals that, amongst the eurosceptic views harboured by the public at large, only 15% would support the formation of a European army whilst 57% would be opposed. Interestingly the table below, which accompanied an article in yesterday's Corriere della Sera, reveals that Britain's Defence budget is the world's third largest - we spend more than Russia - that between them Britain and France spend virtually the same as China, and, if we include Germany, member states of the EU spend

considerably more. It shouldn't take an economic genius to work out that a common European army would provide considerable savings for the beleaguered taxpayer struggling with the consequences of the reckless behaviour of international banking.
But that would mean ceding some of Britain's mythical independence, relinquishing its 'special relationship' as the US's most supine client state.

Different language, different words.

Here's a question I'm pretty sure you can't answer without the help of a decent dictionary: what is the meaning of 'parallelepiped'? I certainly couldn't.

Yesterday whilst reading an article about Carthage in the travel section of the Corriere della Sera, I came across the word 'parallelepipedo'. Unable to guess its meaning from the context, I looked it up in an Italian - English dictionary and found the English translation left me none the wiser until I had resorted to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Stumbling across words I've never previously encountered is a fairly common occurrence when I'm reading the Corriere but a pretty rare one when I'm reading the Guardian. And when you think about it this rather odd. Both papers are targeted at the same type of reader: someone with a university or grammar school/liceo classico education, interested in current affairs and high culture. So one would assume that once a Guardian reader had learned Italian reading the Corriere would present few difficulties.

When Jude Fawley acquires a Latin Grammar to help teach himself Latin and Greek as a necessary step towards fulfilling his ambition of winning a place at Christminster he

'learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.'

I assume the parenthetical aside Hardy gives his narrator alludes to proto Indo-European, the common ancestor of Germanic languages such as English and Romance tongues such as Italian. Although, as Jude has just discovered, English having a common ancestor with a foreign tongue is no aid to understanding, it does seem to reinforce our instinctive belief that foreign languages are simply our mother tongue written in code. Once you've gone through the 'years of plodding' and learned what are the Italian equivalents of English words and how its grammar sticks them together you're home and dry. Unfortunately, you discover that you're not: the pesky foreigner uses words whose English equivalents you've never heard of. His language reflects the fact that he experiences the world in a different way from us: rather than liking things, they are pleasing to him; instead of making do with the one word 'strap' like any sensible Englishman he employs half a dozen; he makes do with the same word for nephew and grandson (nipote) but has invented a special one for your child's parent-in-law (consuocero/a). In semiotic terms, when you read the Corriere the problem is often the signified, rather than simply the signifier, being alien.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A faint flicker of hope.

In my salad days I was a fervent supporter of the Labour Party: it employed me as a canvasser when I was an undergraduate and in my late twenties I was treasurer of my local branch. Although I've never contemplated voting for another party, Blairism destroyed my affection for Labour and my belief in it as an agent of social regeneration. Like a betrayed spouse locked in a loveless marriage, I've been hoping that I might one day find something which would rekindle my hope in the future.

   Yesterday, whilst surfing the web, I stumbled across a political party of whose existence I'd previously been totally unaware: the European Federalist Party.

   A year or so ago I'd made a deliberate attempt to find a party which shared my belief in a united Europe. To my chagrin the only one I discovered was European Socialist Action, a Mosleyite group which shares its interpretation of 'socialism' with the German NSDAP.

   Fortunately, as far as I can tell, the Federalist Party's policies are perfectly acceptable. They claim to be 'free-thinking' and 'radical' rather than socialist, but I can live with that. Given the threat to their future which faces Europe's nations, political union is the priority. If that were achieved one could then campaign for a socialist government. In any case, we all know what a multitude of sins the word 'socialism' can cover: Stalin's perversion, and Hitler's misappropriation, of the term are simply the most egregious. In an article in today's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland reveals that both Shaw and Beveridge shared the nazis' belief in eugenics. I don't think this invalidates socialism any more than Darwin's belief that the traits which lead to pauperism are hereditary undermines the truth of evolution. But it does suggest that divorced from a belief in the sanctity of all human life, and an acknowledgement that moral values are ultimately grounded in faith rather than reason, socialism can become as dangerous as conservatism.

  I'm not so naive as to believe that the Federalist Party is Europe's saviour. Googling them fails to produce any results other than those related to their own website. Their membership may well consist of two men and a dog. Nevertheless I've signed up as a member - given my beliefs I feel it would be an act of moral turpitude to do otherwise.

Placating the plebs.

It's placate the plebs time for the posh-boys' government. First Stephen Hester was pressurised into foregoing his bonus of a little under a million pounds, and then Fred Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood. So all we ordinary folk can rest assured that although our nominal incomes may be frozen and our real incomes are shrinking we are all in it together. The Establishment is dealing firmly with the greedy or the dishonourable. Jeffrey Archer is no doubt penning a speech to the Lords celebrating the fact.

Hester now has to scrape by on his basic salary of £1.2 million. Thank heavens, as the This is Money website points out, Fred still has his taxpayer-funded pension of £342,500 a year to help him cope with his humiliation. 

• 

An article by Jeremy Paxman in today's Guardian articulates the view I've long held that the West is heading for disaster.  We arrogantly assume that it makes economic sense to outsource manufacturing to the Far East, deluding ourselves that we are the only ones with the brains to invent the innovatory products which are made there. In Paxman's words 'western welfare states .... have sold their future for the sake of cheaper televisions and trainers'. To put it another way: Cecil Rhodes said that to be born British was to have won first prize in the lottery of life  - and we have sold that prize for a mess of pottage. 

   Is it possible to retrieve the situation? At a dinner last February President Obama asked the late Steve Jobs what it would take to make iPhones in the US rather than China. 'Why can't that work come home?' Apple's former chief laconically replied, 'Those jobs aren't coming back'. An article in last Saturday's New York Times explains why.  It's not simply that labour costs are lower but that the vast size of the Chinese workforce permits much greater flexibility than is found in the US. Unlike Britain, many of our fellow states in the EU still have healthy manufacturing industries. Although only around a third of the size of China's, the EU's population of five hundred million is large enough to create a manufacturing giant. To do so, of course, assumes that Euroland's woes can be overcome - and the only way to do so is by much tighter fiscal union, accompanied by a democratically accountable political union. Decent pay and working conditions would mean that the price of goods manufactured here would still be undercut by those from the Far East so there would have to be import controls. A small price to pay for an assured future, I'd say.

  Unfortunately the economic crisis is strengthening the appeal to the ill-informed of the xenophobic and fissiparous agendas pushed by idiots like the potty-mouthed Bossi, Marine Le Pen, and the Tory back bench.

  Welcome to The Return of the Dark Ages shortly to appear at a country near you.

The politics of shipwreck.

On Sunday, as part of its extensive coverage of the Costa Concordia foundering off the coast of Giglio, the Corriere della Sera published photographs of other ships which had come to a sticky end. The pictures were accompanied by brief statistics. I had always assumed that the number of lives lost in the Titanic disaster -1,523 - was by far the greatest to befall a passenger liner in the twentieth century. I was wrong. The Lusitania is the other liner whose disastrous end most people are aware of - 1200 lives lost thanks to a torpedo launched by a German submarine. Although the Titanic holds first place in public consciousness as the most tragic of maritime disasters one may well feel that the Lusitania's fate is even sadder. Its passengers' lives were lost not through human error but through human wickedness - the deliberate destruction of a defenceless passenger ship by the beastly Germans.
 Yet the Lusitania was not the only unarmed ship deliberately destroyed by an enemy submarine. On  the 30th January 1945 nine thousand people lost their lives when their ship was torpedoed in the freezing seas of the Baltic. Until I read about it in the Corriere this disaster had completely passed me by. And I wonder why: six times as many people perished as those who died in the Titanic. Part of the answer of course is that the Wilhelm Gustloff was a German ship which, in the words of the Corriere, was 'evacuando personale nazista in fuga' - evacuating fleeing nazi personnel -  though in fact many of them were civilians. I think the real reason for the Wilhelm Gustloff  being consigned to the scrapyard of history is not so much that some of its passengers were nazis but that the Americans weren't involved. Although the Titanic and Lusitania being British explains why we remember their fate, the truly significant fact is where they sailed to rather than where they sailed from. American culture dominates the world, so America's tragedies are projected by Hollywood to fill a global screen leaving those of other nations in the outer darkness of oblivion.





 

Not so full of beans.

Time is a concept whose outward and visible sign is change: without change there would be no time.  And on one level we twenty-first century folk are very conscious of its passing  with our calendars, our clocks and watches accurate to a nano-second thanks to their quartz crystals or radio signals from an atomic clock, and our New Year's Eve celebrations and tedious media retrospectives.

   The truly important changes, though, creep by without our really being aware of them. Without a mirror, I'd probably think that my outward appearance conformed to my inner image which hasn't been updated for some forty years. In my late twenties I shaved off the beard which I'd sported since leaving school and was deeply shocked by what I saw: a fresh-faced eighteen year old replaced by someone verging on thirty - the year at which I then believed senility began. The subtle signs of ageing had been hidden by the face fungus; I started regrowing my beard the following day. And even without the benefit of a beard our families and friends seem to be unchanging - when we see someone frequently the slight physical difference from the last time we saw them is undetectable.  Furthermore, our obliviousness of time extends to those we once knew well though many years have passed since the last time we  saw them: once the initial shock has worn off, the rupture in the space time-continuum repairs itself and the outward change no longer foregrounds itself.  Which brings me on to beans.

  When I was a schoolboy I was literally full of beans. Three times a week the school authorities allowed us to have our own food  cooked in the school kitchens - provided it was an egg or came in a tin. You sent your tin or egg, with the initial of your House and your boarder's number written on it, down to the kitchens where it would be boiled and then sent up by dumb-waiter to Hall at tea-time. I  sent beans. Beans in tomato sauce, curried beans, beans with sausages or, most often, the 'Family-Size' tin - but always beans, my passion  for them was boundless. 

   Strangely, baked beans do not form part of the Italians' diet although you can buy Heinz beans, at enormous expense, hidden away in the ethnic section of hypermarkets. Fortunately, they're also obtainable at a more affordable price from the Lidl stores on the coast which have sprung up to cater for the needs of the financially-challenged. A week before Christmas we went to the shopping mall in Civitanova Marche to buy our elder daughter's Christmas present and when we were coming out my wife asked me if I wanted to go on to Lidl's to stock up with beans. To my own astonishment I declined, and as I did so I realised Time was doing its stuff: my taste buds had changed. Since moving to Italy I have gradually lost my liking for filter coffee - I now find it unpleasantly insipid. For the first few years I cooked a roast dinner every Sunday: now it's a rare event whose resulting  mix of heterogeneous ingredients heaped on the same plate seems vaguely odd. I still look forward to fish and chips when I visit the UK, but almost invariably find they disappoint. English ex-pats rave about cheddar cheese and bemoan its unavailability here. I no longer know why - a decent cheddar is worth eating, but the stuff sold by a recently opened English Shop in a nearby town struck me as unpleasantly cloying with the texture of savoury fudge.

  So just as I have become gradually harder and harder of hearing, but only recently become aware of it, in a similar way my tastebuds have surreptitiously become Italianised by some mysterious process of osmosis. If only the same process operated with what came out of my mouth as opposed to what went in it, I'd be a happy man.